


A Breakable Thing

by Lissadiane



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Coulson too, Kinda canon compliant, M/M, Pietro Still Dies, Super power AU, mutant AU, sorry about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:47:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23416957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/pseuds/Lissadiane
Summary: The Bartons have always had weird shit happen to them, with each generation of new Bartons having to figure out what their weird shit was before it went too weird and someone got hurt.Clint's weirdness might just be the weirdest weirdness of all.A canonical retelling, kind of, except in this one, Clint's got a super secret super power. Sort of.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 33
Kudos: 412





	A Breakable Thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Narcotic_Dollie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Narcotic_Dollie/gifts).



> There are death themes in this, so if that is something you worry might be triggering, I'm going to describe in greater detail in the end notes.
> 
> I wrote this for [narcydoll](https://narcydoll.tumblr.com/) who is my birthday neighbour. A while ago, we were talking about mutant AUs so I thought I'd write a quick, light, funny mutant AU and instead, I wrote this. I hope you like it. HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

“We’ve all got something,” Barney says, punching Clint’s shoulder a little too hard. He’s never been great at modulating his own strength. “You’ll figure it out.”

“You figured yours out when you were three,” Clint tells him, trying not to pout. It’s hard though, because he’s 11 and his voice is still squeaky and soft and high and everything he says comes out sullen.

“Because when I was three, I accidentally smashed through the front door.” Barney rolls his eyes. “Super strength is an easy one to find, baby bro. You’ll figure it out. You’re still a kid. You got plenty of time.”

Clint’s not sure he does have plenty of time, though. The Bartons have always had weird shit happen to them, with each new Barton having to figure out what their weird shit is before it went too weird and someone got hurt. His dad’s a prime example – never figured out how he broadcasted his shitty moods to all those around him til it was too late. Now he uses alcohol like alcohol’s gonna do anything to smother it and doesn’t just make his rages worse and everything feels like a powder keg about to blow.

At least when it blows, Barney’s gonna be strong enough to stand between their mama and their father and hopefully take some of the collateral damage.

Clint’s probably gonna be the one that lights the match.

He tries everything. He jumps out of trees and off roofs to see if he can fly. He cuts the palms of his hands to see if they’ll heal. He tries lighting candles with his mind and breathing under water. He tries reading Barney’s mind and talking to the animals on the farm. He tries coaxing sprouts from the ground and turning water into wine. He stares at his own face in the mirror and tries and tries and tries to change form.

But in the end, he’s just Clint, just plain, ordinary Clint without any powers or mutations at all.

And then, in the middle of the night, he wakes up to the sound of his mama and his father screaming.

It’s not wholly unusual. His parents have been having fights that shake the rafters of the house since Clint was old enough to remember. Usually, though, his father is yelling and his mother is screaming and this time – this time, they’re both shrieking. Wordless, terrified screams.

It’s a little unusual that it’s so loud, though, because Clint hasn’t heard very well since the time his dad knocked him in the side of the head with a fist meant for his mama.

Is this it? He wonders, as he sits up in bed. Is this the powder keg blowing, is this the end, is this the part he always knew was coming, when his father snaps and his mama is lost in the shrapnel?

“Barney,” he says, and he’s fourteen now, his voice is deeper, but just now, it cracks and the baby he used to be bleeds through. “Barney, quick, mama needs you, mama…”

But Barney’s not there. His bed, shoved under the window across the narrow room, is still made with the tight, military corners their father beat into Barney when he was small. The window is open a crack, the tree just outside drifting lazily in the nighttime breeze, and Barney went out and didn’t come home again.

And somewhere, somewhere, mama keeps screaming.

Clint’s up and out of bed and scrambling down the stairs to find her, to save her, before he realizes that the entire house is dark and still and no one’s home at all.

The screams echo from all around and it takes Clint a long time spent searching to realize that they’re coming from his own mind and he doesn’t know how to make them stop.

Barney’s hung over, eyes bloodshot and bright red, when he finds Clint on his hands and knees in the pantry, hands clapped over his ears, rocking back and forth with a high-pitched whine catching in the back of his throat. It takes the doctors three days to calm him down enough to remember how to speak and three more days for them to realize that whatever hearing he’d had before, it’s gone.

Hearing aids fix him right up and they’re state-supplied for foster kids.

Clint takes them with him the night he and Barney sneak out the window and run away to join the circus.

The next time that screaming wakes him up in the night, he pulls his ratty blanket up over his head in his little bunk in the trailer he shares with Barney and squeezes his eyes shut and waits for it to stop.

They find one of the clowns beaten and left to bleed out nearby and Clint acts just as shocked as everybody else.

*

Being an assassin has its perks and one of them is that Clint gets to surround himself with death all the freaking time, and that helps him test the limits of the shit show mutation the universe has decided to gift him with.

He learns that if he doesn’t know the person at all, he doesn’t get any sort of screechy warning that they’re about to die, which is entirely helpful when he’s the one killing them. He learns that proximity is a thing, because a handful of people from the circus die after they leave him for dead and he doesn’t get any sort of warning at all. Which is nice.

He also learns that his own near-death experience didn’t warrant so much as a whisper of warning, but he’s not sure if that’s because he didn’t actually die when Trickshot and Barney shoot him and leave him to bleed out in a ditch, or because he’s not gonna get warning at all when it’s his turn to die.

He’s not sure if he’d like a little heads up that his time is coming, because he’s also not sure if there’s anything he can possibly do to change the outcome anyway. He’s only heard the screaming a handful of times by this point and he’s never managed to make a difference, but then… he hasn’t really tried.

What would be the goddamn point, though, if the warning doesn’t give him a chance to save anyone?

*

Natasha thinks it’s her punch to the head that knocks him out of Loki’s grip and Clint doesn’t tell her it’s because his head was so filled up with Coulson’s screams that there just wasn’t any room left for Loki’s magic.

He’s too busy trying to forget the screams and wash the blood off his hands and that’s how he learns that it’s not all proximity, it’s a matter of how much he loves the person he’s about to lose and that’s a lesson he wishes he never had to learn.

The best thing, he decides, is to stop caring about anybody.

*

It doesn’t fucking work.

And the air is thick with screams in Sokovia so somehow, it’s still a shock when he loses Pietro.

*

Bucky Barnes sneaks up on Clint when he’s busy making other plans. There are the accords and there’s Wanda and there’s Stark and Cap and the shit show there and he’s old and he’s tired and he needs a rest but if Captain America needs him then he’s gonna be there, even if Natasha’s on the other side.

Clint’s never needed government oversight before and he’s not gonna start now, so fuck it and fuck them and he’s gonna take this fight as far as he can take it without, of course, killing anybody he loves or likes or even tolerates in the name of the Avengers and whatever the fuck else.

His head is clear and no one’s screaming as they line up for their brawl at the airport, so. He’s feeling pretty good about things, as far as it goes.

He’s not fighting for Bucky is the thing. He’s fighting for freedom and for Captain America and for the hell of it.

And then he meets Bucky who is a wide-eyed, fucked up, fucking pretty mess of a man who looks somehow younger than Clint but feels older than Clint looks and like he wants a rest just as much as Clint does, like he’d fit in curled up in a rocking chair in a sunspot on the crumbling porch of Clint’s super secret bolt hole in Idaho with a dog at his feet and a book in his hands and – and – and.

Maybe he starts fighting for Bucky, a little. Accidentally.

*

“Just til they fix me,” Bucky says, sitting on an examination bed in a fancy as fuck room in Wakanda. He looks small without his metal arm, his hair pushed back, his eyes still wide and shining. He bites his lip and Clint wants to bite it too but he doesn’t.

“You don’t need fixing,” Clint says, scowling and sullen, arms crossed over his chest. He wants to say other things, more meaningful things, but Steve’s right there and Clint doesn’t know how to work around the lump in his throat.

“Until the words are gone, I’m a liability,” Bucky says. He’s talking to Steve but his eyes are on Clint – Clint’s noticed Bucky watching him nearly as often as Clint’s been watching him lately. It makes his skin feel tight and his fingertips tingle and there were so many things he meant to say and to do but he always thought he had more time than this. He hadn’t heard Bucky screaming in his head so he’d figured he wasn’t gonna lose him just yet.

“We’ll figure it out,” Steve tells him. “It won’t be long.”

“We’ll be right here when you wake up,” Clint says. It sounds a bit sharp around the edges and he swallows hard.

“You promise?” Bucky asks. He’s still looking at Clint.

And fuck it. Fuck it all to hell and back again.

“I’ll wait,” Clint says, because he’s got nowhere else to go. Steve looks relieved and Clint knows it’s because he’s got a billion other places to be and thinks Clint’s doing this as a favour, that Clint’s making a sacrifice, that Clint’s being a team fucking player.

And Bucky doesn’t look like he knows why Clint would bother staying at all.

Clearly he hasn’t made his intentions known.

So Clint rolls his eyes and shoves past Steve and climbs right up onto the bed and kisses that hopeful but wary look right off Bucky’s stupid mouth.

And he’s there waiting forever later when Shuri gets the fucking words out of Bucky’s head and they spend a few beautiful, perfect, peaceful months living in Wakanda raising baby goats and learning everything and anything about who they were before the world fucked with their heads and who they are now that they’ve started putting the pieces together again.

And then it ends.

*

Clint knows Bucky’s not dead, is the thing.

He would have heard the screams so fucking loudly if Bucky had died.

But the fact of the matter is that Bucky is gone and ash is all that’s left and nothing makes sense anymore.

*

It’s a long five years.

*

They off the ship in Vormir and the air is sharp with pain and death and despair and Natasha’s screams –

So Clint grabs her by the wrist and yanks her back into the ship before her foot ever touches the ground.

He’s not trading her, not for anything, not even for Bucky.

When they get back to the others they come up with another plan and no one asks him what was wrong with the first one.

Natasha is careful with him, though, and kind and quiet and treats him like he’s a breakable thing.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she tells him, soft.

*

In the end, they pay a heavy price and Clint is just about useless when it comes to the battle. He tries, but the screams are ringing so loudly in his ears, he can’t focus, he can’t see, all he knows is that Thanos did this so he’s gonna kill Thanos and maybe, maybe, Bruce is gonna hold up his end of the bargain and when all this is over, everyone’s gonna be back and he and Bucky can go back to their little house in Wakanda and their goats and pretend this never happened.

“I knew you weren’t dead,” Clint keeps saying between kisses that taste like ash and smoke and tears. “I knew it, I fucking knew it.”

Bucky’s just swearing, vicious curse worse that crack in the middle, but he’s holding on just as tight and his words cut through the ash on Clint’s tongue with a bittersweet sort of sweetness, so he doesn’t mind.

*

If he was super strong like Barney or if he could run like his mama or if he could fly the way he heard his great great grandmother could, Clint thinks maybe it would have made a difference. He’d have been stronger and faster and there to take the hits no one else would’ve been able to take.

But if he’d been any of those, he’d have let Natasha walk onto Vormir and probably have walked back on his own. He’d have knelt there in the grass with his hands stained by the soot Bucky had left behind and he wouldn’t have known with his entire being that Bucky wasn’t dead – that Clint could get him back again.

And if he’d been strong or if he could fly or if he’d been fast, he might not have ended up here, in this sunspot on this porch, which he and Bucky had lovingly mended together. They would not have ended up here, together, with Lucky curled up at their feet, a book in Bucky’s hands and Clint’s head on his lap as he stares off into the summertime sky, breathing deeply and listening to the wind washing through the leaves and wild wheat around them.

It was a high price to pay but Clint thinks, as he closes his eyes and Bucky’s hand tucks into his, maybe it was worth paying. Just this once.

**Author's Note:**

> Potentially triggery deaths include: Clint's mutation is hearing the screams of people he knows before they die. He hears his parents, people at the circus, Coulson and Pietro. Natasha doesn't die because she deserves better and I literally couldn't do it so fuck that.


End file.
